Abstract

Mirza Muhammad Haydar Dughlat (b. 1499–1500, d.1551) was a Turko-Mongol aristocrat who left behind an ambitious historical work: the Tarikh-i-Rashidi, or the History of Rashid.

In his Persian-language history, Mirza Haydar chronicles the Chaghatayid-Moghul khanate, a remnant of the Mongol Empire, from the mid-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries.

Indeed, the period at the center of the Tarikh-i-Rashidi was a highly tumultuous one that saw the slow, but steady, rise of new Islamic at empires, which brought major political and cultural changes to Central and South Asia. However, Mirza Haydar does not limit himself to an abstracted discussion of political and cultural changes. Rather, he describes at length his own experiences within this highly fluid and formative milieu. The present thesis attempts to recover the ways in which history was imagined, constructed, and practiced in early-modern Central and South Asia by using the Tarikh-i-Rashidi of Mirza Haydar as a case study. Such an examination allows for new insights on the intellectual ecosystem and cultural world in which the Moghul historian lived to come to the fore.